Time & Value: Work, Fashion, Culture

Date: 9 October 2026 – 14-16.30

Banqueting Hall, at Chelsea College of Arts, 16 John Islip Street, London, SW1P 4JU

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In the research project Imaginaries of Value in Globalised Art and Design we are interested in how value and time have been materialised in the arts and how it has been shaped by everyday material culture such as clocks and calendars. Expressions and technologies that have changed through the centuries and reshaped our understanding of time and related the arts as well as everyday material culture, be it food, clothing, work, leisure, the built environment, and so forth.

Time, we find interesting because it has been a vivid lens through which to understand value, often expressed as the difference between quantitative and qualitative time, but also as separators of private and public time, work and leisure, sacred and profane time, as well as who belongs to a group or not. Furthermore, we find it an interesting lens since it has reshaped the arts, art history and other modernising projects preoccupied with globalising and intensifying mechanical regularity, standard unit and synchronized units.

Despite the modernising project’s assault on local cultural understanding of time through homochronicity, polyrhythmicity still abounds, as pointed out by Kevin K. Birth. Likewise, as Caroline Evans & Alessandra Vaccari write, (fashion) design also operates with polyrhythmicity, mixing industrial time with it seasoning schedules that impacts workers and wearers, antilinear time as in its unceasing processes of quotations, and uchronic time, which is similar to Kairos time, when designers produce myth-making and fantasies.

The Family Who Sold Time

Caroline Evans

Between 1834 and 1940, three generations of a London family, the Belvilles, sold Greenwich Mean Time to London firms. Using a highly accurate eighteenth-century watch, they set up a time subscription service, supplying over 200 clients a week with a precise statement of the time so that they could trade effectively. The service lasted a hundred years which spanned enormous technological, economic and cultural change, from colonial and capitalist expansion to the standardisation of Western time in the 1880s. The operations of this small family business neatly exemplify how time both became a commodity and was linked to commodity culture in the nineteenth century.

My paper takes a micro-historical approach to the enterprise, looking at the broader context of mercantile expansion to examine how, with the advent of accurate, standardised time, a global luxury and fashion industry was able to develop beyond the local and seasonal nature that until then had defined it. In part, therefore, I’ll situate the trade links of this family business in the context of what historians have called ‘industrial time’, or ‘clock time’ – the time of production and of labour.

But I’ll end with a more experimental and speculative question. The subscription service required a family member to travel into London once a week to certify the correct time at the Greenwich Observatory, and then to do the rounds of all the customers in a single day. It demanded considerable walking between 40-50 clients’ premises. The last two family members to operate the service were women: Maria Belville from 1856-1892, and her daughter Ruth from 1892-1940. Imagining the sound and rhythms of Ruth’s steps as she paced the London streets, I’m reminded of the London perambulations of a very different woman in the same period, the modernist author Virginia Woolf, whose writing on city walking deals with consciousness in a period of modernist flux (1925, 1930).Add to that the urban poetics of Rhythmanalysis (1990), a short book by philosopher and sociologist of space Henri Lefebvre, and you have the possibility of a new focus on urban walking and rhythm, one which could reveal a somatic alternative to the blunt truths of clock time and industrial value. Might a rereading of both writers in the context of the Belvilles catalyse ideas of simultaneity and polyrhythmicity, two diverse models of time which challenge the hierarchies of value implied by the industrial time of capitalist production?

Cultural Value: Temporal Regimes as Orders of Worth

Patrycja Kaszynska

This talk presents a two-step argument: first, that cultural value is inherently temporal; and second, that the temporal regimes at issue can be understood as ‘orders of worth’ (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006). This has implications for policy decision-making.

Regarding the former, cultural valuation is never a judgment made from an abstract present—a condition rooted in how cultural value is constituted (Kaszynska, 2024). As interpretive, it brings past experience, inherited traditions, present circumstances, and imagined futures into relation. As normative, it involves temporal judgments on what should be sustained, transformed, or eliminated. And as collectively warranted, it remains perpetually open to revision over time. Cultural objects and practices themselves function as forms of mediation across time: a museum object brings the past into present encounters, a fashion garment shapes future trends, and performance effectively resurrects past authorial intentions.

Time is therefore inscribed into cultural value, yet the time in question is not a seamless, uniform flow (Kornbluh, 2024). Just as Boltanski and Thévenot’s orders of worth provide distinct principles for determining what is valuable and what constitutes legitimate justification, different temporal regimes organise the horizons and conceptions of time within which cultural value becomes visible. Economic time may privilege instant calculation, short-term returns, and low discount rates. Artistic time may stress sustained duration, extended repetition, and long-term anticipation. Administrative time, in turn, can be shaped by funding deadlines and institutional cycles, and occasionally by the memory accumulated within organisations. These regimes can coexist, but they frequently conflict: prioritising artistic time can create friction with the economic order, and both may then clash with administrative imperatives.

So what? Temporal choices are not merely technical decisions but value judgements: they determine which consequences can be seen, whose interests become visible, and what kinds of possibilities count. For cultural policy, therefore, the question is not simply what arts, culture, and creative practices are worth simpliciter, but what temporal horizon a policy uses to determine what matters, for whom, and for how long. Making these temporal regimes explicit exposes otherwise hidden assumptions in decision-making, laying the groundwork for more informed choices.

Stopping the Watch: From Algorithmic Time at work, to Conscious Sociality’ 

Phoebe Moore

The organisation of work is the organisation of time. From clocking-in systems and the industrial working day to contemporary workplace ‘people analytics’, digital monitoring and algorithmic management, technologies of temporal measurement have shaped what counts as productive activity and, consequently, valuable work. This paper examines digitalisation as the latest transformation in this relationship between time, work, and value. Drawing on my research on the quantified worker, algorithmic management and AI at work, I examine how digital technologies produce new ways of seeing, dividing and valuing time. Increasingly granular aspects of workers’ activities involving measured activity and inactivity, response times, movements, communications, outputs and even bodily states, are translated into data and incorporated into systems of evaluation and decision-making.

Yet work remains polyrhythmic, shaped by bodies, skills, relationships, care, interruptions, creativity, waiting and recovery that resist reduction to standard temporal units. I argue that the contemporary workplace is therefore characterised by a tension between algorithmic time, and time in conscious sociality. Connecting digitalisation with longer histories of clocks, calendars and mechanical regularity, the paper asks what happens to our understanding of value when time itself becomes datafied, as it is linked with quality work, and what become visible, measurable, and economically valuable.

Organised by

Erling Björgvinsson, Professor of design, HDK-Valand

Dave Beech, Reader in Art and Marxism, UAL

Elena Raviola, Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Professor in Design Management, HDK-Valand

Carol Tulloch, Professor of Dress, Diaspora and Transnationalism, UAL